The Scottish Celtic review

The Latus of Auslaut in Irish. 311/(trie, this seems to be, for tH(s is tlie organiciilly correspondingform.But, as is well known, it is not the t3'iie-form Ii'jkjii whicli hasbecome tixed in the present tense as a form of the absolnte Hexion,but the type-form tiaglmvi, herimm (Z. 42!)). In regard to theseforms, Stokes is at least partly right, when (Beitr. zur Vergl.Spr. vi. 405) he assumes a later affixing of a pronominal element.In this only I cannot follow him— that he disjoins -vimi as anelement of that kind.The form herimm, as is evident at a glance, could not haveoriginated directly from hiur, nor from its preceding forms hcru,herd. If, in the later MSS., we find heruini, tia(jmm, this is onlya peculiarity of the later orthography, for, in Old Irish, only -iinor -aim occurs, both being also written with mm. The formsberimm and biur are to be regarded in the Irish language asforms which are independent of each other. Consequently, if theEuropean bhard, of which the ancient biur is a descendant, doesnot avail here for the explanation of the Old Irish berimm, thenthere only remains for us, if we wish to explain this form organically,to try the Aryan bhurdmi.Let us suppose that this formationwas carried down into the Celtic, then the Old Iri.sh form,after that the i has penetrated into the preceding sjllable, but hadbeen lost in the final syllable, would necessarily be beraim, berim.This inferred form, berim, diflers from the historical form berirnin,only in its having a single m instead of the mm of berimm'.There is now no difficulty in regarding the second m as the affixedindependent pronoun of the first ])erson, and thus it seems to methat the attempt to explain berinwi by the Aryan bhardmi issuccessful.The pronoun of the first person losis its vowel, as allpronouns do when they are affixed or infixed (Z. 329, 333).Thatalso the vowel lost was not in the nominative a slender one, is perhapsshown by the forms bia-m (sim;, ro ba-m, (eram), which havebeen quoted by Stokes (Beitr. zur Vergl. Spr. vii. 39). Thenthe i of beriram must necessarily be explained by the i of theAryan bhurdmi. The rn was probably affixed to preserve the oldnasal pronunciation to the m of the personal termination, since asingle m after a vowel would, according to the Irish laws of sound,have become v in pronunciation. This endeavour, however, topreserve the vi intact may arise from the fact that the independentego is represented in Iri.sh by //((-'. The Old Irish berimm appears